Susan drove everyone into the city in her Honda—she thought of it as hers, though it was Dr. Kyriakides who had taken out the lease. Dr. Kyriakides didn’t drive; the task had fallen to Susan by default; therefore, it was her car.
It was a cold, clear January day, the sun bright but barely strong enough to warm the tarmac. Snowplows had left huge hills of snow on each side of the highway. It had been a snowy winter and the indications were that it would get worse. No snow today but lots of icy runoff; Susan was cautious on turns; downtown, she parked in an underground lot.
Today was the day John was scheduled for tests at Toronto General. TGH was the city’s central hospital, and as she passed through the lobby Susan was reminded of every other hospital she had ever seen. The corridors were pastel green and blue, the paint abraded where gurney carts had bumped against the walls; mysterious doors opened into mysterious rooms; doctors and interns bustled past with fixed, distant expressions. Dr. Kyriakides introduced John to another doctor, a man named Collingwood, while Susan and Amelie staked out chairs in a waiting room. Collingwood was grey-haired, bearded, stout. He spoke in a subdued tone, then led John away down the corridor. Dr. Kyriakides sighed, and rooted out a copy of
Newsweek
from the sidetable. Amelie had found
People.
Susan could not concentrate on reading; she kept her eyes on the corridor beyond the waiting-room door.
She glimpsed John when he passed a second time, without stopping, as he followed Dr. Collingwood down the hall. He had changed into a green hospital gown and paper slippers, and the effect, Susan thought, was of an immense indignity.
When Susan was fourteen years old she had decided to become a doctor. It was a serious ambition, but in the end she realized she didn’t have the stomach for it. Undergraduate biology courses offered confirming evidence that her squeamishness was fundamental, inarguable, and permanent. That was when she detoured into cellular biology. She could deal with living systems as whole entities or as specimens on a slide; it was only that queasy middle ground, the surgeon’s world of pumping blood and palpitating organs, that repelled her. That was the world where her father’s cancer had lived. Of all the ugly facets of his death she resented this perhaps most of all, that he had become an ecology for a virulent and alien growth. It struck her now that what she missed most was the illusion of his sturdiness. Fathers should be solid, front to back, Susan thought. Otherwise nothing was certain. Anything could happen.
Maybe that was how John felt about Dr. Kyriakides.
But, disappointingly, she hadn’t been able to talk to John much in the few days he had been back from Vancouver. He was moody; he had isolated himself in his room. Susan had passed his door and seen him pecking at a computer terminal, curious (but vaguely familiar) symbols flowing across the monitor. She wanted to go in, talk to him, say something that would make him happy. But it was not a privilege she had earned. No real intimacy had passed between them and Susan felt ashamed of her feelings, the schoolgirl crush she had obviously developed. John was, as Dr. Kyriakides continued to insist, in some sense not even truly human.
But Susan knew what it was like to feel set apart, to feel different. Growing up in a California suburb, bookish and shy, citizen of an invisible country somewhere between Fantasyland and Pasadena, she would have welcomed the idea of a gentle superhuman sweeping her off her feet.
Except that he did not sweep. And “superhuman” didn’t mean what it should. And he was not even especially gentle.
And worse—unless Dr. Kyriakides could do something about it —he might be dying, or at the very least losing himself…
leaving me,
Susan thought childishly; voyaging off, like her father, wherever people go when they leave their sullen, grieving families abandoned by the graveside.
But these were hospital thoughts. Susan walked down the corridor to a vending-machine cafeteria and bought herself a cup of coffee, hoping to shake the mood. Machine coffee in a styrofoam cup, cloyingly sweet and hot enough to raise blisters. She liked it.
When she got back to the waiting room Dr. Collingwood was there. He was a bear-shaped man, but not really large; he was only just as tall as Susan and the effect, as he turned to face her, was of some stern but basically amiable big animal. “This is Susan?” he asked.
Dr. Kyriakides nodded.
Collingwood said, “We have John in a room upstairs while we wait for time on the scanner. He asked for you to come up.”
Susan was a little flattered, a little frightened. She followed Collingwood to the elevators and up two floors, then down an identical corridor to a small room in which John was sitting in his hospital gown.
Collingwood closed the door and left them alone.
John motioned to a chair. Susan sat with her hands primly in her lap.
He said, “You look more nervous than I am.”
“Are
you nervous?”
“Not about the PET scan. Apprehensive about the results, obviously. Hospitals frighten you?”
“Yes.” She didn’t explain why.
He said, “I brought this.”
He reached into a day bag beside his chair and lifted out a portable chess set in a folding wooden box. “We have some time to kill while they warm up the machinery. If you don’t mind, I thought I’d like a game.”
She smiled. “You’ll win.”
“But that’s not why I play.” He sounded almost sheepish. “I like the patterns. It’s like a dance. I like to watch it unfold. Is it all right?”
“Of course,” Susan said.
He cleared away a stack of magazines from the courtesy table and set up the game. Susan opened with her king’s pawn; John replied in kind. It was a gentle opening, a Giuco Piano, the so-called Quiet Game.
She studied the board. He said, “You think I’ve been avoiding you.”
She was startled out of her thoughts. “Well, I—”
“Because I have been. Not avoiding you personally. It’s just that I didn’t want to face the questions.”
She could only echo, “Questions?”
“The questions you never asked because you were afraid of what I might say. Questions about what I am. About what it’s like, being what I am.”
Susan felt herself blushing.
What kind of monster are you?
—it was true; the question had never been far away, had it?
She moved a knight, mainly to conceal her nervousness.
“I thought we should talk about it now,” John said. “If you want to.”
“I’ve thought about it,” she admitted. “I’ve tried to imagine it.”
“Did Max ever talk about me—about his work, in any detail?”
“I was never even allowed to see his lab animals. Nothing beyond the cellular level. Not much theory.”
“Part of the problem is that we don’t have an adequate vocabulary. People talk about ”intelligence‘ as if it consisted of certain discrete acts—solving problems, acquiring knowledge and storing it. Most of the standard tests reflect that. But it’s really a superstition. When you talk about intelligence what you’re dealing with is human consciousness, which is not simple or schematic. I think even Max knows better now.“
He advanced his queen’s knight pawn. Susan gazed at the board abstractly; she couldn’t concentrate on the game.
He said, “There’s an evolutionary question about intelligence, what it’s for and how it arose. There’s a theory that intelligence evolved along with the upright posture, and for a similar reason. Among other things, Susan, a neuron is a clock—a timing device. But a single neuron has a widely variable firing time—it’s a clock but not a very good one.” He brought out his king’s knight. “Two neurons are a little better, because the errors begin to average out. Three neurons are better still, and so on. And clocks are good for operations involving timing. For instance, a dog: a dog is fairly good at catching things. But a dog couldn’t throw a rock at a moving target even if the dog were anatomically equipped to do so. Taking aim at a moving target makes demands on the neural clock the dog just can’t meet. Even the primates: you can’t train an ape to throw a baseball with any accuracy. Making an accurate baseball pitch means solving a complex differential equation, and doing it on the molecular level. It takes neurons.”
Susan marched her king’s bishop down the ranks.
“If the theory is correct,” John said, “then we evolved all this neocortical tissue so that we could stand on our hind legs and throw stones. Consciousness—intelligence—was the unforeseen side effect. Because the very calculation, the act of estimating speed and distance, of picking up the stone and taking aim, it
exiles you from time.
You understand, Susan? ”If the antelope is
there,
and I aim over
there‘
—it implies I and thou, self and other, birth and mortality. Makes you human. Not just
I am
but
I was
and
I will be.
Fruit of the tree of knowledge. It makes you the animal that stands just a little bit outside of time.“
His own bishop came rolling out. It was as if his hands were playing chess for him while he spoke. Susan responded with a reflexive pawn move, awed by this outrush of words.
“When Max was doing his work, of course, no one thought of intelligence this way. It was all much more linear: brains were calculating machines and we had better calculators than the apes. And there was no theoretical cap on it—you might imagine building a better brain the way the cybernetics people were upgrading Univac. Building a better human being. I think what Max imagined was a kind of ultimate Socialist Man, rational and benevolent.” John advanced his queen’s pawn a square, smiling to himself. “It didn’t occur to him that he might be creating the more perfect baseball player. Or that a man with more cortical tissue might have more terrifying dreams. Or that ”intelligence‘ is a kind of exile from temporal experience—that he might be engineering a creature more wholly alienated than anything that had walked the earth before. Lost in time. Your queen’s pawn.“
“What?” Susan was startled.
“You’re thinking of moving your queen’s pawn. Not a bad move, actually.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“There are only so many reasonable moves available—and you’re a reasonable player. But cautious, sometimes timid. That rules out a few things. Also, it’s not hard to tell what part of the board you’re focused on. And there are clues when you’re about to move. You lean forward a little. You clench your right hand. Yes, it’s that obvious.”
“I don’t like the idea of being so—transparent.”
“No one does.”
She hesitated, then pushed the pawn anyway. He continued, “This is by way of a warning.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You see, I know why you’re here. Here in this room, here with me. You’re here because you have the unusual perversion of falling in love with amiable monsters. And that’s what you mistook me for.”
This is the kind of monster I am,
he was saying: a genuine one, and not amiable at all.
She should have answered with something polite and distancing (to reassure him); or she should have stood up and walked out (because he was right). She did neither. She was feeling reckless and disoriented; she obeyed a momentary impulse and stared back at him. “What about you? You don’t feel anything? You’re so g-goddamn
aloof!
That’s why you told me your life story that day in Kensington Market? That’s why you came back from your island?” She clenched her fists under the table. “Tell the truth: do you at least l
-like
me?”
He blinked—it wasn’t the question he had been expecting. Maybe, she thought, that was a good sign.
The room was silent for a moment; she could hear the ventilators humming.
“I could lie,” John said slowly. “How would you know?”
“I wouldn’t. I would trust you.”
“I’ve lied to other people. Cheated other people. Stolen from them.” He looked away. “Once I made love to a woman and left the bed wondering whether I’d committed an act of bestiality. That’s a stunningly arrogant question to ask yourself. The terrible thing is, I don’t know the answer.”
“Then answer
my
question.”
He looked back at the board. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I like you.” Regarded her calmly. “You’re thinking of moving your queen’s bishop.”
Damn his infuriating confidence! “No,” she said, “I’m not”
“No?”
Obeying another impulse: “My knight. There—see? If I move him back into the first rank I uncover the rook’s threat on your queen. While you’re getting her out of harm’s way, the knight takes the black bishop.” She lifted the knight and thumped it down defiantly.
John stared at the board.
Surprised him again,
Susan thought. Finally he advanced his queen, developing a threat toward her rook… but the rook was defended; his bishop was not. She took the piece.
Seven moves later he had cut through her pawn ranks and opened the white king to attack. But his own defenses were a shambles; his castled king was locked in by her rooks. She was coordinating a strong final assault when he advanced his queen through an opening she had not noticed. “Mate,” he said breathlessly.
But he was sweating. He looked up at her, and the look on his face now was the expression of a frightened child.
Susan understood suddenly what this tepid victory implied.
“Oh,” she said. She reached for his hand across the table; it was feverishly warm. “John—”
But then the door opened: Dr. Collingwood, with Dr. Kyriakides behind him.
Collingwood cleared his throat. “We’re ready now.”
Maxim Kyriakides watched through a glass dividing wall as a nurse installed John in the bone-white ring of the PET scanner and administered an injection of glucose laced with fluorine-18, a radioactive isotope. The isotope would diffuse through the tissues of his body, breaking down and releasing tiny bursts of radioactivity. The video monitor, over which Collingwood was hovering like a protective parent, would then translate this radiation into a picture of John’s brain. Rather, Maxim thought, of the
activity
of his brain, not specifically the physical structure; this was the superiority of the PET scanner over a CAT. Maxim had never operated such a device; he was more strictly a creature of the test tube, the laboratory animal, the microscope. Consequently he watched from a respectful distance as the images began to scroll up.